Delay Line Memory...

Sed find and replace: A true love story

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 11:10:57 -0500

sed -i ‘s/vampire/cannibalistic serial killer/g’ /home/user/ebooks/vampireSTORY.txt

A single find and replace makes it obvious that anyone who knowingly falls in love with a vampire is psychotic.

Get your WAN IP Address

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 16:42:36 -0500

curl ifconfig.me

Driftnet: Display images from TCP Streams (aka, spy on people)

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 19:37:05 -0500

Driftnet: Display images from TCP Streams (aka, spy on people)

Cool HTML editor for Gnome

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 19:36:05 -0500

Cool HTML editor for Gnome

My Favorite Text Editor

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 19:32:05 -0500

I like vim, I really do, but its not the text editor I use when I’m writing html/css or LaTeX or php… The editor I generally go to when I’m getting down to business is TEA. It is very fast, has great syntax highlighting, templates, and a built in image viewer. I love this editor. :)

Features from the Site:

Small size
Built-in MC-like file manager
Spellchecker (using the aspell or/and Hunspell)
Tabbed layout engine
Syntax highlighting for C, C++, Bash script, BASIC, C#, D, Fortran, Java, LilyPond, Lout, Lua, NASM, NSIS, Pascal, Perl, PHP, PO (gettext), Seed7, TeX/LaTeX, Vala, Verilog, XML, HTML, XHTML.
Multiply encodings support
In-text labels (markers) support
Code snippets and templates support
Scripts (Python, Perl, Ruby, Bash script, QtScript)
Hotkeys customizations
“Open at cursor”-function for HTML-files and images
Misc HTML tools
Wikipedia, Docbook, LaTeX, Lout editing support
Preview in external browsers
String-handling functions such as sorting, reverse, format killing, trimming, filtering, conversions etc.
Bookmarks
Morse code translator
Calendar/organizer
Drag’n’drop support (with text files and pictures)
Built-in image viewer (PNG, JPEG, GIF, WBMP, BMP, SVG, TIFF, TGA, etc.)
Built-in image converter and resizer
Built-in ZIP packer/unpacker with file names charset selector
RMS calculation for 16 bit PCM WAV’s

Tea runs on Linux and Windows. It has a GTK and QT branch. And its fast, featureful and nice to use. Check it out here:

http://tea-editor.sourceforge.net/

My favorite thing about tea is the input field on the bottom. Its sorta like a terminal for the editor. :)

Head Tracking for Gnome/Linux

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:33:42 -0500

Head Tracking for Gnome/Linux

Kernel Log: First release candidate for Linux 3.1 - The H Open Source: News and Features

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 15:10:53 -0500

Kernel Log: First release candidate for Linux 3.1 - The H Open Source: News and Features:

reallinux:

The Heise Kernellog summarizes the happenings in the development of the Linux Kernel in a short and easy to understand form.

I just installed the 3.1 Kernel, so guess I’ll see how it goes when I reboot!

Linux: Will Open Justitia become opensource?

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:50:00 -0500

Linux: Will Open Justitia become opensource?:

reallinux:

The Swiss federal court has developed a software to make the management of court decisions easier and planned to release the software under the GPLv3.

However, just before the source code was to be released, the process was stopped.
Several companies that develop proprietary software for Swiss…

Linux System logs

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 13:22:24 -0500

All of the Log Files on Linux are located in /var/log

If you type “tail /var/log/messages.log” you will get the last 10 messages on your system log file.

On my computer when I typed “tail -n 3 /var/log/messages.log” it shows the last 3 entries of my system log, which looked like this:

Aug 2 12:06:59 localhost avahi-daemon[1343]:New relevant interface wlan0.IPv4 for mDNS.

Aug 2 12:06:59 localhost avahi-daemon[1343]: Registering new address record for <my-ip-address> on wlan0.IPv4.

Aug 2 12:06:52 localhost dhcp[2964]: forked to background, chid pid 2990

Common Linux log files name and usage

/var/log/messages.log: General message and system related stuff
/var/log/auth.log: Authenication logs
/var/log/kern.log: Kernel logs
/var/log/cron.log: Crond logs (cron job)
/var/log/maillog: Mail server logs
/var/log/httpd/: Apache access and error logs directory
/var/log/boot.log : System boot log
/var/log/mysqld.log: MySQL database server log file
/var/log/secure: Authentication log
/var/log/utmp or /var/log/wtmp : Login records file

You can use these log messages to check up on boot errors, to see who’s been logged into your system, or check on your cron jobs.

Besides tail, you can also grep (search) your log files for specific terms. An example would be searching all the logs in /var/boot for the word “fail”

example: “grep -i fail /var/log/boot”

this would then list all the instances where boot failed.

There are also a ton of 3rd party log viewers, both FOSS and Proprietary, available for linux. These log viewers often have features like log analysis, tracking, etc. Which can make finding issues a lot easier.

Ksystemlog for KDE

http://www.kde.org/applications/system/ksystemlog/

Gnome log viewer for gnome

http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-system-log/

AWstats for web servers (its pretty impressive and their site has a demo you can check out)

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

Cyclops, a CLI log analyzer (it only shows log entries with errors/suspicious behavior)

http://tam.hiddenrock.com/projects/cyclops/

There are hundreds more, and I would suggest you check out your distribution’s software packages or start a forum thread for recommendations. :)

Oh and one more extra tip:

You can have your system log messages show up in conky - the desktop system information program. Just stick this entry into your conky:

${execi 30 tail -n3 /var/log/messages}

Having Fun with Strace

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 14:36:00 -0500

Strace is a program that shows the system calls a program makes as well as signals received from the user or other sources. Each line in the trace contains the system call name, followed by its arguments in parentheses and its return value.

meskarune ~/Desktop $ strace echo hello

execve(“/bin/echo”, [“echo”, “hello”], [/* 29 vars */]) = 0

brk(0) = 0x8c04000

mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb78cf000

access(“/etc/ld.so.preload”, R_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

open(“/etc/ld.so.cache”, O_RDONLY) = 3

fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=140504, …}) = 0

mmap2(NULL, 140504, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 3, 0) = 0xb78ac000

close(3) = 0

open(“/lib/libc.so.6”, O_RDONLY) = 3

read(3, “\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0\3\0\1\0\0\0\220\223\1\0004\0\0\0”…, 512) = 512

fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=1467012, …}) = 0

mmap2(NULL, 1473000, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0xb7744000

mmap2(0xb78a6000, 12288, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x162) = 0xb78a6000

mmap2(0xb78a9000, 10728, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb78a9000

close(3) = 0

mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb7743000

set_thread_area({entry_number:-1 -> 6, base_addr:0xb77436c0, limit:1048575, seg_32bit:1, contents:0, read_exec_only:0, limit_in_pages:1, seg_not_present:0, useable:1}) = 0

mprotect(0xb78a6000, 8192, PROT_READ) = 0

mprotect(0xb78f0000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0

munmap(0xb78ac000, 140504) = 0

brk(0) = 0x8c04000

brk(0x8c25000) = 0x8c25000

open(“/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive”, O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 3

fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1852464, …}) = 0

mmap2(NULL, 1852464, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 3, 0) = 0xb757e000

close(3) = 0

fstat64(1, {st_mode=S_IFCHR|0620, st_rdev=makedev(136, 0), …}) = 0

mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb78ce000

write(1, “hello\n”, 6hello

) = 6

close(1) = 0

munmap(0xb78ce000, 4096) = 0

close(2) = 0

exit_group(0) = ?

In the above example I ran “echo hello” through strace. As you can see, the echo program was executed from /bin and access’s quite a few library modules before actually writiing “hello” to the screen. When a value -1 is shown, that mean’s there was an error with the program. If you have a program that crashes upon loading, using strace can help you figure out what the problem is. Strace is also useful to help new users learn what libraries and modules a program uses when it is executed. Try running strace on ls, cd or vim!

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the..."

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 20:03:05 -0500

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

- George Bernard Shaw

Awesome CSS lab that shows CSS code along with a working...

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 16:23:36 -0500

Awesome CSS lab that shows CSS code along with a working example. Click the photo to see a fixed side bar example.

Git Hub’s 404 page makes me really happy

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:52:29 -0500

Git Hub’s 404 page makes me really happy

How to have a Pretty Colored Bash Prompt

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:38:00 -0500

If you spend a lot of time using your terminal, you might like to liven it up a bit. I’m sure you’ve all seen the custom bash prompts people have in screen shots of xmonad or awesome WM. It turns out that changing your prompt isn’t really hard to do at all. here is mine:

My bash prompt has a yellow user, blue directory location, and green dollar sign. (you can get much fancier than this, and have the date and time, uptime or number of process’s displayed in your prompt)

To make your bash prompt look like mine for example, you would open /home/YOUR_USER/.bashrc in your favorite editor. In my case I would type:

vim /home/meskarune/.bashrc

then I commented out the regular prompt which looks like this: PS1=’[\u@\h \W]\$ ‘

and replaced it with this:

PS1=’\[\e[1;33m\]\u\[\e[m\] \[\e[1;34m\]\w\[\e[m\] \[\e[1;32m\]\$\[\e[m\] \[\e[1;37m\]’

Now every time I open sakura or stjerm or xterm, etc I am greated with a pretty bash prompt. :)

For a basic intro to colored bash prompts see:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Color_Bash_Prompt

For a list of all possible variables you can use in your prompt see:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-tip-prompt/

For a huge list of bash prompt themes you can use see:

http://gilesorr.com/bashprompt/prompts/index.html

And If you want to get crazy and have a bash with full of color graphics, transparency and different fonts check out bashish:

http://bashish.sourceforge.net/screenshot.html

and even if you don’t want a super fancy bash prompt, you own it to yourself to click on the link above. I was seriously left speechless.

Ok, I’m gonna cheat and give you ONE screen of bashish, but seriously, go check out the site.

yeah, that is an LCARS themed terminal.

Beautiful Dark and MATCHING GTK 2 and 3 Theme

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 05:35:59 -0500

If you are like me, and don’t use standard gnome programs, you have a conundrum. Your gtk2 and gtk3 programs no longer have a matching theme. But now your problems are solved! here are 2 dark matching themes to make your linux pretty again.

Atolm:

gtk2:http://skiesofazel.deviantart.com/art/Atolm-191381339

gtk3: http://thedeviantmars.deviantart.com/art/Atolm-gtk3-206663190

On arch linux you can install these themes via your favorite aur client.

The Sound of Data

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 19:14:48 -0500

The Sound of Data

Beautiful Monospaced Fonts for your Terminal

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:31:00 -0500

Click the pictures to download the fonts

Inconsolata

Andale Mono

Droid Sans Mono

Honorable mentions:

Dina - it is a great font to use for very small sizes (8 - 10 point) http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Jibz/Dina/

Gohu Font - has very clear differentiations between characters, it looks a bit blocky to me, but it seems very usable.

http://font.gohu.eu/

For a large list of programing fonts, both free and non-free go here:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/work/FontSurvey.aspx

Epic list of Python-GTK Applications

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 08:44:00 -0500

Epic list of Python-GTK Applications

Lutris : Gaming on Linux

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 03:44:56 -0500

Lutris : Gaming on Linux

Software Review: Sunflower

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 03:36:37 -0500

I just discovered the Sunflower file manager, and I have to say I am very impressed.

Project Page: https://code.google.com/p/sunflower-fm/

Sunflower is a python-gtk file manager with 2 tabs, a built in terminal, and an impressive number of file operations. Its very fast, very light weight, has media previews, drag and drop, and it looks nice too boot. I have been looking for a pcman-fm replacement, and this definitely fits the bill. Sunflower has become my default file manager on fluxbox, and I use it along with ranger (a fantastic command line FM) I would encourage ya’ll to check out the screencast here: http://youtu.be/eEHh4zPjHTE